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‘Not a Bunch of Weirdos’: Why Mainstream Investors Buy Crypto

Bitcoin might seem like the preferred tender of conspiracy theorists and criminals, but everyday investors are increasingly embracing crypto. A study of 59 million consumers by Marco Di Maggio and colleagues paints a shockingly ordinary picture of today's cryptocurrency buyer. What do they stand to gain?

When Will the Hot Housing Market Finally Start to Cool?

Housing prices keep soaring as demand outstrips inventory, a trend that's likely to continue even as interest rates rise. Nori Gerardo Lietz argues that it's time to reconsider policies that stymie housing development. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Diagnostic Bubbles

The financial crisis of 2007-2008 revived academic interest in price bubbles but many conceptual questions remain open. This paper generates insights into the structure of asset price bubbles by modeling beliefs from fundamental psychological assumptions, and combining this with standard neoclassical mechanisms, such as learning from prices and speculation.

Do Bitcoin and Digital Currency Have a Future?

SUMMING UP Bitcoin has shown to be a powerful digital currency, but the real story of the future is Blockchain, say James Heskett's readers. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Bubbles for Fama

Nobel laureate Eugene F. Fama has famously claimed that there is no such thing as a bubble, which he defines as a large price run-up that predictably crashes. Analyzing industry data for the US and internationally, the authors find that Fama is mostly right that a sharp price increase of an industry portfolio does not, on average, predict unusually low returns going forward. Yet the authors show that there is much more to a bubble than merely increases in prices; they show a number of characteristics that predict an end to the bubble.

Extrapolation and Bubbles

Bubble episodes have fascinated economists and historians for centuries, in part because human behavior in bubbles is so hard to explain, and in part because of the devastating side effects of the crash. At the heart of the standard historical narratives of bubbles is the concept of extrapolation—the formation of expected returns by investors based on past returns. This paper presents a simple model of extrapolative bubbles that explains a lot of evidence and makes new predictions.